There is an aspect of the gospels that has struck me of late. It has to do with the experience-life of Jesus, and it has to do more broadly with the idea of the genuinely human Jesus as the divine Son of God.
That Jesus would be by some objective standard "perfect," is of little application to us, in that it is we who must presume thereby on analyzing such an ostensible standard. This, of course, we cannot do perfectly, and if we fuss over the notion that Jesus was perfect because of this or that we merely make ourselves ridiculous.
Then we are left with the only sort of legitimate (or at least honest) assessment we can make about Jesus' perfection: it seems to us that the case must be so--it seems to us that Jesus is perfect. At least by accepting our limited means of assessing the perfection of Jesus we can draw ourselves up to responsible assessment of what we do know about Jesus.
For example, Jesus complained. The utterance "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" is a complaint. There is no pretending otherwise, though in the Jewish heritage the notion of a supplicating complaint is distinguished from a sinful complaint. Jesus was behaving genuinely, and he was behaving so while in the throes of suffering that would make no sense as a sharing in humanity's torments if Jesus was not sharing simultaneously in the contortions of thought that accompany human suffering.
That is not the only time Jesus complained--though the commentators seem eager to ignore that reality. Repetition as a motif in Scripture--something said (or done) twice or three times--is taken usually to indicate authoritative finality. If Jesus, having asked in the garden to be spared his suffering, had accepted God's refusal the first time and returned to his place of prayer twice again only to ratify that acceptance, the notion of repetition in that sequence would surely be taken by the commentators to indicate the profundity of Jesus' resignation to his fate.
But Jesus was not resigned in such manner to his fate. He prayed to escape it, and then he prayed twice more to escape it--having evinced an initial resignation. He did what human beings would do. He did perfectly what human beings would do, an ideation of Jesus' incarnation that is infinitely more profound than the centuries'-worth of cant from the churches to the effect that their Jesus did "God-things" while hauling around a human husk. It is no wonder that the harrowing repetition of Jesus' agonized complaint to his Father is overlooked so routinely by the denominations.
This realization about the character of Jesus is attached for me to the story of the Prodigal Son (and indeed this realization is crucial if we are to understand a large part of that parable.) We all know about the younger son who wasted his inheritance, and we all understand the father in the parable to represent our loving and forgiving Father. It is not surprising that the prodigal's journey and the father's welcome capture our attention. Nor is it surprising that the elder brother's anger is less captivating to us. I have heard the second part of the parable brushed aside as merely a sorry (though cautionary) reference to a "legalistic older brother," or some such.
But the elder brother's complaints have the virtue of being entirely true (or at least ratified as such by the father.) "Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment . . . . And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine" (Luke 15:29). The profundity of these two statements from the father ("thou art ever with me" and "all that I have is thine") could not have been greater in the milieu of the gospels. The second is perhaps more pertinent to the parable at hand, in that it concerns the (as-yet-to-be-settled) fate of the younger son. The younger will not be as one of the hired hands of the estate, but neither--having forsaken his patrimony--will he be elevated again to the stature he might once have held. Moreover--and this seems to be forever lost to the commentators--the younger son's diminishment will be two-fold. Not only will his stature be lessened, but the unavoidable implication of his father's blessing on the elder ("all that I have is thine") is a conferring upon the elder of the headship of the family. The father and the elder are bound in such manner as could never be experienced by any others of the household--certainly not a lesser son.
The first statement from the father ("thou art ever with me") is even more profound. The elder son is blessed perpetually with an unequalled fellowship with the father. In that the implication of the parable is as a model of the forgiving and merciful love of God, the most logical conclusion about the figurative character of the elder brother is as a representation of Jesus. Jesus has complaints against his siblings, complaints that have the unquestioned virtue of being entirely true. There is nothing wrong with voicing complaints, as long as one is willing to accept a legitimate answer. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with repeatedly voicing the same complaint, so long as one is working genuinely to try to understand and be reconciled to the situation. That is how one can approach perfection as a genuine human being, and we should not be surprised that scenarios (such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son's Brother) that illustrate the moral character of Jesus depict Jesus as a perfect human being, not as a perfect being pretending to be human.
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